Psyche Out

Eskimo; 2005

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Glasgow's Optimo have been packing them into their Sunday night sessions since 1997. I've never been, but in an era of shrinking club attendance (at least in the English-speaking world), the fact that they seem to be growing means they must be doing something right. That "something" is probably appealing to an utterly devoted yet wide audience. Optimo's founders and residents, JD Twitch and JG Wilkes, play everything from moldy old funk tracks to modern indie to hardcore acid to ragga dancehall.

But before you recoil in horror at the thought of even more post-2 Many DJ's whimsy: they don't do mashups, they aren't into incongruous blends for their own sake (Ciara + Rednex...wheeee!), and they don't front like crossing genre and decade borders is reinventing the wheel. They just know what good DJs have known since Francis Grasso started blending funk and rock as a cruising soundtrack. Like the sampled Primal Scream preacher dude said, they know music is music. And if you're really good, you can blend it all and keep the floor filled all night.

The Grasso reference isn't just me showing off what a knowledgeable guy I am. (Okay, maybe a little.) Way before 3/4ths of you (and me) were even alive, Grasso invented disco mixing by blending heavy rock and heavy funk (Santana, JB, War, etc.) for a rabid audience of newly sexually liberated future yuppies, guppies, and buppies. While Psyche Out contains plenty of music beyond Grasso's reach (everything that came after Giorgio Moroder, for instance), any mix that opens with Hawkwind and the Silver Apples and climaxes with the Chambers Brothers must capture a little of his feeling.

Coming less than a year after their How to Kill the DJ Pt. 2 mix, Psyche Out is indeed heavy. HTKTDJ2 (phew) was impossibly flashy and virtuosic-- all jump cuts between scene, sound, and mood. Psyche Out is less manic, more roiling, brooding, cosmic. If anything unites the 40 years of music here, it's the compulsive, hypnotic power of repetition. From psyche rock to krautrock to disco to acid house to our own cannibalistic little fin de sicle, the tribe vibe of dancing your ass off in a dark, smoky room (or zoning out) (though that takes us dangerously close to Lazer Floyd territory so best to keep moving) still trumps doing coke in the bathroom and "networking."

The middle section is one big throb. Acid (and the proto-acidic industrial that preceded it) has lost none of its futuristic blankness (those gnomic, endlessly circling riffs) and post-Atari jungle rite abandon. (The urge to strip naked and smear yourself with raw hamburger while envisioning yourself as an extra in Tron, in other words.) In its original form, Herbie Hancock's "Raindance" fires disembodied bleeps from a synthesizer the size of your couch into an inky black void (of the "space, the final frontier" sort). Here the Optimo boys direct those bleeps into the sticky center of Sweet Exorcist's "Mad Jack", an odd bit of gray techno-exotica, like if someone had dumped a rain forest into the middle of Sheffield.

Carl Craig puts 21st century rims on the perverted Eurodisco of Throbbing Gristle's "Hot on the Heels of Love", but it barely needs them. (Sleazy disco, ironic or otherwise, transcends time and place, I guess.) And I have to admit I did a little "woo!" when they mixed up the Stranglers' "Bear Cage" with the "giant ball bearings in the titular device" beats of Mr. Fingers' "Washing Machine". Norman Whitfield's "psychedelic soul" productions for the Temptations helped usher disco into existence (really, no shit, The Wire told me so), and "Papa Was a Rolling Stone" is like trying to escape a black hole of molasses, all baritone gravitas and string melodrama. So they mix it into Koenig Cylinder's "Carousel", which is like being sucked into some kinda space tornado, all milky way swirls at top speed. (Sorry I'm getting so ridiculous simile crazy here, but the last twenty minutes of this mix are maybe the most exciting thing I've heard this year.)

There's something similarly tornado-like about the drums on Dinosaur's "Kiss Me Again", which bring us back down to earth in time for Johnny Cash, winking at us silly disco bunnies from beyond the grave, to gently see us on our way. There's nothing remotely "2005" (you know, 50 Cent, Iraq, pornographic hamburger commercials) about any of this, but, hey, weren't we all supposed to have evolved into silicon-based lifeforms by now anyway? Or be dancing on the cinder following nuclear doomsday? There's just something heartening about the fact that we're still even mucking around in these meat bags, dancing to heavy repetitive music, doing lots of drugs, and enjoying that moment when the humid weather matches the humid music. Or laying on the floor staring into space. If you must.